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Stop comparing guns to cars already

Cars are designed to transport people, and while dangerous, that was not and never was the intent of designing it. It was designed as a technology to ultimately better society and commerce.

Guns were designed for only one purpose: To kill, damage, destroy, or obliterate whatever is in the path of the bullet it fires. It has no useful purpose to society, other than to kill a person or people. We use them to fight wars (kill), to hunt (kill), and to shoot targets and inanimate objects (damage, destroy, obliterate).

No car was ever designed to do any of those things, with exception to tanks and deathrace 2000 cars, both which are not legal for civilians to own.

Comment

Cars and guns are machines. Humans invent machines to do things that would otherwise be harder to do without the benefit of the machine.

Cars followed trains, which followed wagons, which followed chariots.

Guns followed bows, which followed spears, which followed clubs.

Machines can be used for good or evil. The same can be said for nearly any machine. The simplest machine, a lever, can be used to rescue a trapped person. It can also be used to roll a sleeping homeless guy onto a subway track, in front of an oncoming train. The lever is neither good nor evil. The person who uses it defines the good or evil of the act by their intention.

Assigning moral value to the machine is a misdirected argument.

An AR15 in the hands of Adam Lanza has no more purity of purpose than the revolver the lady in Walton County, GA used to save herself and her kids a couple of weeks ago.

"Anthropogenic global warming is a proposed theory whose basic mechanism is well understood, but whose magnitude is highly uncertain. The growing evidence that climate models are too sensitive to CO2 has implications for the attribution of late-20th-century warming and projections of 21st-century climate. If the recent warming hiatus is caused by natural variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural climate variability." --Dr. Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Comment

An AR15 in the hands of Adam Lanza has no more purity of purpose than the revolver the lady in Walton County, GA used to save herself and her kids a couple of weeks ago.

So if a revolver that can only shoot 10 rounds has the same purity of purpose as a semi-automatic rifle that can shoot 100, then why do we need both? If they are both designed to do the same thing, but in the wrong hands only ONE of them can kill 2 dozen kids in a few seconds, then why not ban that one so it doesn't so easily fall in the the wrong hands?

Cars and guns are machines. Humans invent machines to do things that would otherwise be harder to do without the benefit of the machine.

Cars followed trains, which followed wagons, which followed chariots.

Guns followed bows, which followed spears, which followed clubs.

Machines can be used for good or evil. The same can be said for nearly any machine. The simplest machine, a lever, can be used to rescue a trapped person. It can also be used to roll a sleeping homeless guy onto a subway track, in front of an oncoming train. The lever is neither good nor evil. The person who uses it defines the good or evil of the act by their intention.

Assigning moral value to the machine is a misdirected argument.

An AR15 in the hands of Adam Lanza has no more purity of purpose than the revolver the lady in Walton County, GA used to save herself and her kids a couple of weeks ago.

Nobody's assigning a moral value to a machine.

They're assigning a moral value to the purpose for which the machine was created.

Machines can be used for good or evil. The same can be said for nearly any machine. The simplest machine, a lever, can be used to rescue a trapped person. It can also be used to roll a sleeping homeless guy onto a subway track, in front of an oncoming train. The lever is neither good nor evil. The person who uses it defines the good or evil of the act by their intention.

Everybody knows this, but there are some inanimate devices that are considered too dangerous to be in widespread use by the general public because there are evil, irresponsible, and just plain stupid people out there. Public safety is a concept the NRA seems to miss. In advocating rights, they forget that MY right to live in a safe environment is as important as arming every Tom **bleep** and Harry.

Cars are designed to transport people, and while dangerous, that was not and never was the intent of designing it. It was designed as a technology to ultimately better society and commerce.

Guns were designed for only one purpose: To kill, damage, destroy, or obliterate whatever is in the path of the bullet it fires. It has no useful purpose to society, other than to kill a person or people. We use them to fight wars (kill), to hunt (kill), and to shoot targets and inanimate objects (damage, destroy, obliterate).

No car was ever designed to do any of those things, with exception to tanks and deathrace 2000 cars, both which are not legal for civilians to own.

/Thread

/Comparisons

/Debate

Having shown that one element of your argument is false, we can logically assume that all of your argument is false due to a false premise.

Comment

Cars are designed to transport people, and while dangerous, that was not and never was the intent of designing it. It was designed as a technology to ultimately better society and commerce.

Guns were designed for only one purpose: To kill, damage, destroy, or obliterate whatever is in the path of the bullet it fires. It has no useful purpose to society, other than to kill a person or people. We use them to fight wars (kill), to hunt (kill), and to shoot targets and inanimate objects (damage, destroy, obliterate).

No car was ever designed to do any of those things, with exception to tanks and deathrace 2000 cars, both which are not legal for civilians to own.

/Thread

/Comparisons

/Debate

Having shown that one element of your argument is false, we can logically assume that all of your argument is false due to a false premise.

Nice try though.

Thanks for slirting the point entirely and focusing on the semantics of tank ownership. Allow me to re-pphrase:

You cannot own a FULLY ARMED & FUNCTIONAL tank, nor the same level of functional RPG, Rocket launcher, or any other military-grade weapons.

Nice try, but pointing out unspoken semantics on my side doesn't change the point one single iota.

Cars are designed to transport people, and while dangerous, that was not and never was the intent of designing it. It was designed as a technology to ultimately better society and commerce.

Actually there are a lot of cars that aren't very good at transport, but are designed to go at illegally and dangerously high speeds (and motorcycles are even worse)...on the street (these aren't set up for the racetrack)

So it really depends on what the nature of the comparison is.

For instance, just a look at what these cars really are for. That issue exists even if guns didn't exist at all

Comment

Cars are designed to transport people, and while dangerous, that was not and never was the intent of designing it. It was designed as a technology to ultimately better society and commerce.

Actually there are a lot of cars that aren't very good at transport, but are designed to go at illegally and dangerously high speeds (and motorcycles are even worse)...on the street (these aren't set up for the racetrack)

So it really depends on what the nature of the comparison is.

For instance, just a look at what these cars really are for. That issue exists even if guns didn't exist at all

The car may have been designed to go fast, illegally or not, but it still was not designed to kill. Nobody ever spent the R&D time and money on a car design, saying "Hey, I like this car, but it just doesn't have the capacity to mow down 100 vietcong in 60 seconds, can you make it more lethal?"